Page 24 of Creed (Rock Hard Mountain Men #3)

Robyn yelped the moment he stepped foot into the water, and quickly covered his hands over his mouth to stifle the noise. He’d accidentally stepped into the deeper area, and the water reached halfway up his thigh.

I held onto him as we waded through the river, making sure he didn’t get swept away. The water wasn’t too deep, only coming up to about my waist at its deepest point, but the current was strong, and it could be dangerous if it took our feet out from under us.

We stepped carefully over the loose rocks and slimy plants until we reached the opposite riverbank. Once out of the river, the night air hit my wet skin like someone had dumped ice inside my clothing. I shivered strong enough to make my teeth chatter and hugged my arms close to my chest.

“How much... farther?” I asked, trying not to bite my own tongue when I talked.

Creed looked at Robyn and I shivering with a sympathetic expression. He’d kept Mavis out of the water, so she was dry, and although he was also wet, he showed no signs that he even noticed the cold.

“Not much farther. We just need to get far enough away from the river so that if they aren’t fooled by the false trail, then they still won’t easily find us.”

Apparently, to Creed “not much farther” meant another two hours of hiking.

Based on the watch strapped to his wrist, it was just past five in the morning when we saw the first signs of daylight in the sky.

We’d escaped some time around one in the morning, so we’d only been hiking for about four hours, yet it felt like we’d been walking for days.

“Here,” Creed finally announced, pointing to a patch of forest that looked no different than anywhere else.

I stood there, doubled over with my hands on my knees as I tried to catch my breath.

“Here, what?”

Creed pulled back a bush to reveal a small opening in the rocks that I hadn’t even noticed.

“We’ll take shelter here for the day and continue our journey once night falls. This should be safe enough.”

The entrance of the cave wasn’t very big, bit inside it was more spacious than I expected.

Part of it must have extended underground.

I’d just been held in an underground room for days, so the thought of returning underground wasn’t very appealing, but I had to admit it was a great choice for shelter.

The ground was dry and comfortable, and the entrance was nearly invisible from the outside.

I threw the bag off my back and collapsed onto the earthen floor. “How did you know this was here? I didn’t even see it when we were standing right next to it.”

Creed lay Mavis down on the ground farther back in the cave and encouraged Robyn to remove his damp clothes so they could dry properly.

“I figured there had to be a cave of some sort around here based on what the Milford sisters described.”

To my shock, he pulled out several pages of the translated journal that he’d made. I hadn’t realized he’d brought any of it with him, but he’d apparently stuffed as many as he could inside his pockets.

“Lisianthus gave a detailed description of their escape and their journey through the mountains. The landscape has changed over the last hundred and twenty-five years, but it’s still similar enough for her descriptions to be useful.

I just wish I’d been able to translate more of it before we left.

There might be more information in the journal about this mountain that we could use. ”

“I can help with that,” Robyn piped up from the back of the cave.

He left his sister’s side to root through the pockets of the supply bag. There hadn’t been time for either Creed or I to thoroughly inspect the bag, so we didn’t know what exactly it held other than the basics.

To both of our shock, after a moment of searching, Robyn held up a very familiar journal.

Creed accepted the offered journal, turning it over in his hands like he feared it would suddenly turn to dust. “You took this?”

Robyn dug the toes of one bare foot into the dirt, sheepishly not looking at any of us. He had stripped down to us underwear in order to lay his wet clothes out to dry, leaving his embarrassed blush on full display as it spread past his face and down onto his chest.

“Yeah. I just... everyone was so obsessed with the thing, so I figured it had to be important, right? If it’s important, then it can probably help us. Nobody in the community really pays attention to me, so I can come and go from most places in the village without notice.”

With careful fingers, Creed flipped through the pages.

Until now, he’d been working entirely from pictures of the journal, and never actually seen the real thing.

It was a sturdy leather book with a particularly thick binding.

Whoever made it, whether it was one of the Milford sisters or someone else, had ensured that the journal was strong enough to last through the ages.

“Was that all right?” Robyn asked, still looking very self-conscious. “I know stealing is wrong, but kidnapping is worse, isn’t it? Is it okay to do something wrong if it’s to fix a bigger wrong?”

Creed closed the journal with a snap, and carefully set it aside on a rock so it stayed well out of the dirt.

“It’s definitely okay. Plus, this journal was stolen to begin with. You’re just returning it to its rightful owners.”

He led Robyn back to his sister before the boy could bring up any more questions of reality.

The last thing we needed was Robyn having a crisis of conscience on our hands on top of everything else.

To keep the boy distracted, Creed insisted that he wake up his sister and try to get her to eat and drink something.

She was sick and needed to keep her strength up, but she probably wouldn’t appreciate being hounded by two strange men she didn’t know.

Robyn instantly agreed, and once he was fully engaged with his sister, Creed returned to the front of the cave.

“That boy doesn’t realize what he’s done,” he said as he sat down next to me.

“That journal will be a great bargaining chip with the cult, but it’ll also make them a thousand times more determined to find us.

On our own, they might have been willing to let us go.

But with the journal... well, we’ve already seen the lengths they’re willing to go to. ”

I knelt in the dirt near the cave entrance, taking off my clothing one piece at a time and spreading it out in a patch of morning sunlight. My skin was still damp and covered in goosebumps, but I no longer felt quite as uncomfortable once my wet clothing was removed.

“We’ll survive,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I felt. “We just need to get to a town and then call your friends for help, right? Easy. We’ll be safely out of here before those insane cultists even come close to finding us.”

With my clothing taken care of, I sat down beside Creed and cuddled up to him for warmth.

“You know, watching you be a one-man A-Team has been pretty hot.”

The smirk that Creed gave me was unfairly attractive. “Really?”

“Oh yeah.” I trailed a discrete hand up his thigh. “If we were alone in this cave right now, I’d definitely be jumping you.”

I sighed, letting him feel exactly how disappointed I was.

“I guess I’ll just have to wait until later. So, for now, you better hold me. I’m wet and cold, and it’s all your fault.”

Creed didn’t utter a word of protest as he complied with my request.